Jimmie Durham. - book reviews

In principle, the idea of this fresh Phaidon series on well-known contemporary artists looks fine. Each profusely illustrated convolution is composed of a diverse put of texts by various authors. The sections are arranged according to an unvarying overall structure: first there is an interview with the artist, then a scan of the artist's career, and then a section called "Focus," which is a shut look at a single work. Each of these is by dint of a different art historian or critic. nearest there's "Artist's Choice," a piece of not-necessarily-art-related writing chooseed by the artist. The final section of each work "Artist's Writings," may include formal essays, journal entries, alphabetic characters or interviews.

One would think that like a multiplicity of perspectives could hardly fail to bring out a fully three dimensional portrait of an artist and his or he oeuvre; it should also avoid the danger of bias, narrowness, eccentricity or boredom that the single-author body risks. This approach would also look perfect for the typically short attention spa of today's readers; if you don't find a particular section exciting, it won't take lengthy to get through it, and the nearest chapter may turn out to be more gratifying.

These volumes do not, however, provide compelling evidence that the multi-author universal is foolproof. The most conspicuous point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled is an extreme unevenness of critical insight as well as of literary quality. Take, for example, the work on Richard Deacon. The interview leadershiped by Italian critic and curator Pier Luigi Tazzi immerses the reader (and his interviewee) in tedious, jargon-glutted theorizing about space and language. Here, for instance, is the way he discusses the plastic art of Ulrich Ruckreim with Deacon:

Ruckriem throw backs quite closely Jacques Lacan's reading of Sigmund Freud in which the phallus is not a phantom in the faculty of perception of being a figure. Nor is it an external reality nor the organ itself. It is a simulacrum, a signifier whose prime meaning is "to be or not to be," to be there, to be place upright with a specific mass, a specific material, worked in a specific and simple - way. upon the other hand you consider the substance of the phallus independently of its function as a signifier, or its erection and its erectibility.

To which Deacon replies, "Ye I conceive so."

Tazzi's interview elicits real little concrete explication from Deacon himself about in what manner he develops sculptural forms, by what mode he deals with materials and operations or how real-life experience has affected his career. The overlook of Deacon's work by Jon Thompson is similarly abstract and far off with the bulk of it given above to linguistic theory. If you had solitary Tazzi's interview and Thompson's essay to advance on, you might suppose that Deacon is a conceptualist like Lawrence Weiner. This is absurd and frustrating considering the manifestly non-theoretical nature of Deacon's endlessly ingenious, hands-on involvement in formal invention and the processe of making.

One arrives, then, with great relief at Peter Schjeldahl's enchanting essay upon the single work Keeping the Faith. Schjeldahl concentrates intensely upon the material and formal actuality of what gazes like a big, squashed basket and derives his interpretations directly from that experience without importing theory from far afield. In a hardly any short pages, Schjeldahl brings Deacon's work vividly to life. He transports a sense of its physical neighborhood its humor and its metaphorical suggestiveness in a way that nothing other in the book does. And because he strains into the work so intimately, his surprising generalizations about its funky overbuilt elegance have feeling exactly right: "... a powerful impression of over-the-top craftsmanship, is a keynote of his poetic - of the Deaconian. It amounts to an original sculptural diction that is the one and the other formally impressive and comical, like an Armani suit upon a horse."

But then, reading Deacon's "Artist's Choice," a chapter from Purity and Danger through the British social anthropologist Mary Douglas, individual returns to perplexity. Douglas's discussion of in what manner themes of purity and uncleanness figure in different mythologies is fascinating, on the other hand the reader gets no help in applying it to Deacon's work. Finally, the devoutly plodding entries in the "Artist's Writing" section work for mainly to prove Deacon a far les interesting writer than sculptor and, more generally, to display that artists are not always the best spokespeople for their have enterprises.

The other three volumes suffer from similar ups and downs. In the Stockholder turn Barry Schwabsky (survey) and Lynne Cooke (single work) tender perspicuous texts, but the true copys in "Artist's Choice" by Julian Jaynes, who writes interestingly upon the metaphorical basis of consciousness, and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, who theorizes abstrusely upon society, shed precious little direct fight upon the artist's work. And as an interviewee, Stockholder herself speaks in the way that soberly and carefully that you bewilderment where the zaniness of her bizarrely heterogeneous assemblages and installations tend hitherwards from. She explains that she relies upon her tendency to estheticize as plenteous as